Put this museum on your “to avoid” list. Unless you’re into:
- second rate works by semi-known modern artists, e.g. ceramic plates painted by Matisse;
- grim collections of ‘30’s decorative art; e.g. an armchair set which has now become one of the grand mysteries in life to me, because how can “upholstered in python-skin” seem so good in concept and yet be so lame in execution?; or
- absolutely awful contemporary “art.”
And I mean awful. I enjoy going to contemporary art galleries, because the works are either good or so bad that I can make fun of them in (hopefully) hilarious ways. But in every gallery there is a work so bad, so stomach-churningly aesthetically offensive, that my displaced-Victorian soul dies a little when I see it. Apparently, all of those works are shipped directly to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, home of, for example, a 2009 work whose creator seems to have skinned some road-kill, wrapped the only-partially-cured pelt around some rebar, and then sprinkled the whole thing with confetti.
And if that piece seems like something that would appear in a movie satirizing the art world, so much more so was the featured special exhibition: “Deadline.” It featured the works of terminally-ill artists who used art to meditate on their approaching deaths…. Yikes.
